PS4 will not suffer major losses at launch 'unlike PS3,' says Sony

Sony does not foresee major losses being incurred at the launch of the PlayStation 4 later this year, unlike what was seen during the development and launch of the PlayStation 3, Sony CFO Masaru Kato said during an earnings call earlier today.

"Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4," said Kato.

"At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the chip, the Cell chip," he explained. "Development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities invested by us ourselves. But this time, yes we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate and also product investment and all the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don't have to make all the investment in-house."

Sony's next-generation console will use semi-custom accelerated processing unit chips made by technology company AMD. These chips have been designed to allow developers to "easily harness the power of parallel processing to fundamentally change the console gaming experience," AMD's John Taylor said when the partnership with Sony was announced in February.

Sony did not provide a sales forecast for the PS4.

Earlier today Sony announced its financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013, reporting the company's first net profit in five years with earnings of 43 billion yen ($434 million).

The company reported a "deteriorated" income in its games division, with a year-over-year decrease from 27.6 billion yen to 1.7 billion yen ($18 million). Sony cited a decrease in PlayStation Portable hardware and software sales as well as the PlayStation Vita's price drop as factors contributing to the loss.